BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I really like the uncertainty. This is a game of resource commitment, and such games are vastly more interesting when the players have imperfect information.

[Yonah] This is isn’t really changing the visible information, it’s just making it more prominent. The useful information about winning bids (and therefore the perceived value of resources) is freely available, but only to players who take the time to comb through the GNDT log. Removing the ability of rich/lucky players to have their individual winning bids hidden doesn’t like seem a great loss.

I would like to add “The Net should also announce how much Credits each Player earned while restocking.”

Completely agree - uncertainty is good, but encouraging droll calculation in the GNDT is bad.

It is changing the visible information though, especially if we announce how many restocking credits people get.

I agree about restocking, but not winning directions.

[Koen] I disagree both that this isn’t changing visible information and that obtaining the info currently available takes that much work. Simply by glancing at the GNDT sidebar and comparing it with the last cycle’s resolution post, you can easily see what each player’s net gain/loss of credits/marines were, which is the only information you’d need the GNDT for. This information is useful, but there are many cases where it doesn’t necessarily allow you to deduce the size of winning bids. For example, this last cycle Patrick influenced the Mine, and his net credits remained the same. From this we guess that he sent 4 credits to the Mine and split the other 4 out for income, but it is also possible that he sent only 2 or 3 at the Mine and sent 2 or 3 at some other institution which he failed to influence.

If you show how much they bid for the stuff they won, everyone can figure out how much they restocked though so you might as well show it too.

Another point: Implementing this would massively cheapen the Watchtower institution.

Give the latest Cycle results may have at least one human-error in them, I’d really rather we were able to double-check the results, even if this removes some oblique “it looks like people think the Mine is worth 4, but maybe it was only worth 2 and Patrick chose not to pick up the free money” shadows.

It’s not like this proposal is the end to ambiguity. In many ways it exposes deeper, more interesting ambiguities, especially as resource inflation allows for more complex orders.

CoV